Pearce – politics’ new poster boy for hypocrisy

Bradley Bytes – A sort of political column by Dara Bradley

Hypocrisy is not new in politics.  But when Fine Gael local election candidate Pearce Flannery called for a ban on election posters, he really did take hypocrisy to new heights.

It’s not that banning posters was a bad idea.

It’s just that the person calling for an end to “unsightly, environmentally unfriendly” posters, which are “a hazard to motorists and pedestrians”, was the very person whose mug was on posters on almost every lamppost around Salthill in May.

Pearce ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ Flannery only put them up because every other candidate had posters, he said. Pearce wanted a level playing field. To be poster-less gave the others an edge, he argued.

It couldn’t possibly be that he was being opportunist, or populist, and speaking out of both sides of his mouth. Of course not.

Pearce pledged to ban posters in subsequent elections, if the people backed him on May 23.

They did. And yet we haven’t heard of Pearce’s proposed election posters’ ban since.

No doubt Pearce is using the City Council’s summer recess to come up with a wording for a bye-law that will outlaw the use of election posters in future.

We look forward to reading his proposals in the autumn.

Déjà vu: In the dark

The first City Council meeting in September should be lively. Top of the agenda could well be why City Hall apparently kept elected members in the dark about plans to delay the lowering of the road at Lough Atalia until next year.

Fianna Fáil’s Michael John Crowe was not best pleased to learn of this development in last week’s Sentinel. “One time Galway City Council would have informed councillors” he snorted on Twitter, with a link to our story.

For some reason Lough Atalia is a project that officials prefer not to update councillors on. Remember, when this was discussed at Council level, councillors went bananas over a lack of consultation. That time, councillors learned of the proposal on Galway Bay FM.

We thought it was all water under the, eh, Lough Atalia, bridge . . . until last week’s Council executive booboo.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.